Sleep Ecologies: Tools for Snoozy Autoethnography

Video

DOI

Autoethnographic and other first-person research methods are a topic of increasing interest in design and HCI. This focus parallels the boom in self-tracking and personal informatics, perhaps most intriguingly in the intersection of quantitative and qualitative data and the noticing of patterns in one’s own life and everyday wellbeing. But how can design support this? One opportunity is for research probes, or tools, which enable forms of self-inquiry, by design researchers themselves, or others. In this paper—with the broad scope of healthier student sleep as a domain—we present a series of artifacts designed by undergraduates as tools to enable autoethnographic exploration, and detail how they have been used to investigate bedtime routines, personal scheduling of time, focus, sleep data, and sleeping in non-traditional places. We also reflect on the notion of combination autoethnographic ‘kits’ as a way forward for forms of self-inquiry.